Finland: Improving Pupils’ Opportunities for Experiencing the Joy of Learning, for Deep Learning, and for Good Learning Achievement

A fundamental dynamic feature of Finnish education is the role of the national curriculum, renewed after 1985 approximately every 10 years. Over this course, it has been becoming less detailed. The latest revision (2014) was associated with an explicit reform to integrate key (transversal) competences in the core curriculum. The central idea of the revised National Core Curriculum is that transversal competences are embedded into curricular objectives of each subject. Transversal competences are promoted in teaching and learning in every school subject and in multidisciplinary learning modules. Such modules allow students to overcome disciplinary boundaries in their understanding of real-life phenomena, and foster development of transversal competences. Municipalities and schools contribute significantly to the practical implementation of the curriculum: they adjust it to their local priorities and conditions. Some important issues associated with the implementation of the curriculum–such as assessment of transversal competences and learning outcomes of multidisciplinary learning modules–remain yet open. The lack of clear guidelines makes it difficult to compare transversal competencies between schools. Additional research is needed that would perhaps help replace the existing selection of transversal competences in the curriculum with theoretically more robust constructs.